Glamming up a classic Girl Scout cookie

Kitchen 1540's Jeff Bonilla tackles our Kitchen Masters Challenge

Mythic names from the “time-tested pantheon of color-coded cookies,” as a writer once described Girl Scout Cookies.

With the youth organization’s 100th anniversary in March — its cookie fundraiser will engulf San Diego offices and grocery-store entrances through Sunday, when booth sales end — it’s the right time to issue a Kitchen Masters Challenge, Girl Scout-style.

So I called up Jeff Bonilla, a high-end pastry chef/chocolatier known for confidently experimenting with desserts.

Kitchen 1540

THE CHALLENGE: “Take a crack at your version of either the Thin Mints or the Samoas, the two best-selling Girl Scout Cookies, respectively.”

HIS RESPONSE: “My wife was a Girl Scout,” said Bonilla, 30, whose offbeat humor is hidden by a starchy chef coat and subtle manner.

When he accepted the task, L’Auberge’s pastry chef knew he’d have the customary week to come up with a Kitchen Masters solution. He didn’t know that, with the help of our local Girl Scout council, I recruited a 9-year-old to judge his dessert.

“I was having a hard time figuring out exactly what kind of cookie this is. I’m assuming it’s a sugar cookie, with caramel, toasted coconut and chocolate,” Bonilla said on the day of his big reveal. The Little Brownie Bakers company that makes the Samoas said it’s a “vanilla-based cake” with the toppings described above.

“What I’m going to do is my version,” Bonilla said.

Trained in French pastry techniques at the San Diego Culinary Institute, Bonilla made a ganache (a melted mixture of heavy cream, semisweet chocolate, butter, vanilla paste) and spread it over an elegant plank of slate, which acted as a plate.

Placed on the slate next, something from the world of French desserts: a bar of chocolate cremeux (heavy cream, sugar, egg yolks and chocolate chips melted, whisked, then chilled into a mousse).

Bonilla's other sweet job

Pastry chef Jeff Bonilla is part of a new modernist-cuisine cooking team called Evolve. They're doing an eight-course pop-up dinner at the Wellington restaurant March 6 and 7. He's handling the desserts, Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Barron and catering chef Flor Franco the savories, mixologist Mike Yen the cocktails. For more details, visit evolvecuisine.com.

Dollops of caramel sauce acted as a kind of sweet, amber glue for toasted coconut flakes and crumbled sugar cookies made in-house and dehydrated.

Bonilla added ganache droplets and broken slivers of semisweet chocolate. And, incorporating his interest in modernist cuisine (some people call it “molecular gastronomy”), Bonilla blended lecithin powder and caramel into an airy froth — it joined a scoop of house-made caramel gelato and sprigs of stevia leaves on the slate.